eBay Entices New Sellers with Updated App for Quick Listing

eBay can seem schizophrenic in how it treats sellers. On the one hand, it puts a lot of hurdles in front of serious sellers (even those selling part-time). At the same time, it entices what it calls “consumer sellers” by offering them easy-to-list tools.

Today’s announcement is one example of the latter – eBay updated its mobile app so sellers can list “in seconds” – even Apple iPhone 7 Plus 128 GB, which it said sells for $3,351. It encouraged people to look around their homes for items to sell, including examples of other mobile devices such as the Apple Watch Series 2, which it said sells for $1,621.

Sellers can earn top dollar with the help of eBay’s new technology, according to the announcement.

“Today, eBay is releasing a new update to its Android and iOS native apps that further simplifies the listing process and makes selling even easier. The update, which makes the process especially streamlined and appealing for new sellers, allows items to be listed on eBay within seconds.

“Sellers find the product they are listing by scanning in the barcode or typing a description, selecting the condition and clicking “list your item.” With 170 million active buyers in search of items, everyone can easily make money by selling on eBay.”

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Kelly Vincent, eBay Vice President of Consumer Selling Product & Engineering, was quoted in the announcement, which urged sellers to “cash in and sell these popular items that may be hiding around the home.”

Also see this eBay corporate blog post by Megan Scurich, eBay Senior Product Manager of C2C Selling (Consumer to Consumer), who wrote in part:

“Our new tool is an evolution of the ability to search for a product by barcode to actually being able to list and start selling something simply by scanning a barcode. The update takes advantage of our structured data, providing insight into more than 1.1 billion listings on our site. We then pair that with historical data so that you can quickly list your items at the optimal price point.”

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.

Of course its aimed at new sellers because anybody that has been selling on Ebay very long realizes that all these items they are trying to get the new sellers to list are high dollar scam items where the seller will most likely lose their money as well as their item. But Ebay will retain their 10% of the sale and hopefully help increase their ASP which seems to be lagging these days. The race to the bottom seems to finally be affecting Ebays numbers a bit now. Funny how they never thought about that until recently.

I decided to try this out before I ripped on it and updated to latest app version prior to testing.

1) It’s not really materially different than previous recent app versions. I scanned a UPC (FYI eBay catalog team, that’s a type of GTIN used here in the US), and the app pulled up a number of similar, but different model numbers of the device model I scanned. I had to scroll through 4 incorrect (but similar) items until locating a listing for the correct eBay catalog item.

Inexperienced users may easily make hasty mistakes or assumptions believing the barcode scan will automatically deliver the correct ePID listing item (which can obviously cause a lot of downstream pain if the listing goes is completed incorrectly.

After I selected the correct item and clicked the “sell one like this” button the app prompted me to select the condition, then dropped me into the main listing options list where I selected “Format & price”.

Strangely, as is often the case with the app, it suggested (as it for some strange reason it often does) that, “Buyers are more likely to purchase this item when you list it as an auction.”

I have never found eBay’s pricing guidance to be particularly accurate given an items traits, and I didn’t now either. This time, I estimate that eBays suggested pricing is roughly 15-20% higher than what recent identical NWT sold items have gone for, and general market pricing.

Hopefully at some point eBay will figure out how to properly integrate Terapeak’s data with it’s own systems to provide better pricing guidance.

BOTTOM LINE: I don’t see any truly new features or functionality in this app version. Sure, I ‘can list in seconds’ but the pricing will be off and more importantly, unless users are paying very close attention, it’s quite possibly to select an incorrect item to list.